Homebin : Real Estate Online Marketing Case Study

Real Estate Online Marketing : Overview of the Challenge

Marketing something intangible, such as real estate brokerage services, poses a major challenge to any company in such an industry. Intangibles such as brokerage services cannot be sold online – the homes represented by an agent must be visited, and prior to closing, substantial paperwork ensures. How then, can a real estate agent generate leads through ? For HomeBin Discount Realty, creating a method to generate new prospective clients as cost effectively as possible is one answer. Its previous website presented the first contact for most clients. HomeBin retained Polar Design to improve the cost per prospect of this sales tool with efforts ranging from redesign of the web site to a search engine marketing campaign. Both endeavors proved their success through measurable increases in visitor traffic and “conversion” as measured by contacts through the web site.

HomeBin’s Goals and Challenges:

Prior to working with Polar Design, HomeBin had already deployed a web site that was generating leads successfully. A pay per click campaign drew visitors seeking homes for sale to the site and “converted” them to prospects by requiring registration to access the full Massachusetts Multiple Listing Service (MLS) database. The challenge therefore was not to implement what the client already knew was generating prospects, but to improve its effectiveness. HomeBin’s principal goal, reducing the cost per sales prospect, implied a number of objectives, consisting of improving the sign-up rate (“conversion”) of first time site visitors to prospective clients of HomeBin’s discount brokerage services; setting HomeBin apart from other agencies that provide FSBO or discounted commissions; and increasing total visitors at an optimal long-term cost through search engine optimization (SEO) and link building.

Polar Design’s Real Estate Online Marketing Solution:

After an in-depth analysis of traffic sources and costs, as well as the web site’s interface design, Polar’s usability and design team conceived of a system to simultaneously provide samples of richer MLS content combined with increased “calls to action” (e.g., a “register to view” link) to engage visitors, enticing them to register to view specific information. Besides increasing conversion, new functionality and design would, in theory, also increase incoming leads. For example, Email Listing feature was conceived to allow friends to send emails to other interested friends with links to MLS home profiles. Using a trusted friend’s referral to HomeBin simultaneously produced more leads and created brand awareness.Next, Polar focused on three major areas in order to solve the initial concerns: usability, functionality, and an updated look and feel design. To further ensure ease of use, Polar identified usability issues such as difficult to locate home search tools, which the designers re-positioning on every page. Additionally, the design team created new layouts where formatted tables presented MLS home data in an easy to understand layout.Polar increased the functionality of HomeBin’s site with extensive search tools, including an advanced MLS search tool with allowing proximity searches based on very specific criteria like the number of garage spaces or the presence of a basement. Development included new “personalization” features, such as allowing registered visitors to “save” homes of interest as well as frequently used search criteria in their own “portfolio”. The rebuilt the interfaces and new functionality put extensive research capability in registered visitors’ hands allowing them to conduct searches at their own pace without initial broker contact. However, contacting brokers remain just a click away if assistance is needed. The site previously had an important feature that kept registered visitors in constant contact with HomeBin – a daily e-mail that sent notifications of new properties that match criteria. Polar improved this, as well, by designing an attractive HTML e-mail and tuning the search algorithm, further enhancing this relationship-building functionality.Although the core elements of HomeBin’s brand were well established, Polar enhanced that brand on the site with a customized look and feel designed to better appeal to the main target markets, first time home buyers, comprising younger professionals and recent immigrants. Light blue, turquoise, and ivory were selected to evoke a positive and fresh feeling. The light blue is welcoming while the turquoise adds a calming feeling. Ivory was chosen to convey lightness without the intensity of a purer shade of white. Polar’s multi-cultural marketing resources provided beneficial here – a large percentage of the immigrant population seeking discount brokerage services identified themselves as South Asian in origin – this suggested the culturally appropriate blues and ivory hues, often used, respectively to convey serenity and sunlight. The combinations of the three colors help signified youth while encouraging feelings of serenity offsetting the stressfulness of purchasing a home.

Polar solved the traffic side of the equation by implementing an extensive performance based search engine marketing campaign to help build HomeBin’s brand. A linking campaign was implemented along with the adoption of various well-known methods such as mini-sites based on MLS content, as well as proprietary methods. The mini-sites which keywords and data specific to a particular market, are optimized to attract visitors searching for homes in that market, attracting highly targeted traffic. Additionally, by delivering demographic data and homes for a specific market, visitors who locate the mini-site in search engines are likely to find homes of interest faster, thus boosting conversion of those visitors to registrants.

Deploying a solution as comprehensive as the HomeBin web site using either off- the-shelf components, or starting from the ground up with custom development would have been an expensive proposition. Comparable solutions have been developed by major real estate companies for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Polar Design was able to cost-effectively build the entire solution within a much smaller cost range thanks to its InsightBuilder® Core rapid application framework- a series of reusable PHP components that eliminate development of commonly used software functionality, thus reducing development time and cost.

Homebin’s Marketing Results

HomeBin’s visitors and registrations increased significantly after the launch of their new website due to the combination of SEO efforts and requiring registration to access the full MLS directory and search tools. Due to search engine positioning HomeBin went from 0 unique daily visitors in 2006, to 60 in July, 2007, and an average of 121 as of March, 2008. Additionally, HomeBin is now averaging 6 daily registrations from visitors referred by search engines or web sites linking to HomeBin, up from 3 in 2007. One measure of the site’s position in search engine, its Google “Pagerank”, rose from 3 to 4 illustrating the continuing effects of SEO. Increased link popularity and visitor traffic for one of the city specific mini-sites rose from 24 monthly visits in November, 2007 to 104 in March, 2008. Other methods of attracting targeted visitors registered similar growth and results through the period, and traffic levels persist due to the permanence of incoming links and corresponding link popularity.

While these results are important in and of themselves, what has been the greatest benefit is the improvement in HomeBin’s bottom line. The constant flow of “organic” traffic from its search engine positioning has allowed HomeBin to avoid thousands of dollars, mostly, in online ad expenditures.

The new website demonstrates how an attractive design, improved usability and useful functionality helps entice more visitors into increasing their contact with a company through registrations and referrals. This, combined with an increase in targeted traffic, has generated the results described. Of course, one question remains – “at what cost?”Polar Design’s InsightBuilder rapid application development framework allows faster, more cost-effective deployment of features such as Google maps, an e-mail notification system, and mini-sites generated by MLS data. This meant that the initial phase of the project did not exceed an initial development budget that was less than $100,000, providing the client substantial value. The rapid application development framework made this possibly, reducing development time and cost by 30%. Combined with the performance based marketing campaign, the project cost means that HomeBin’s long term cost per sales lead with the new web sites will be a fraction of its cost with its legacy site and pay per click advertising expenditure prior to 2007.

Polar Design continues to develop insights and best practices in comprehensive online advertising and marketing management. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with questions about your own initiatives.